Tiny Kline

Some children on 77th Street, my mother included,
knew her as the woman who barked if they crashed their bikes into
her faultless lawn and flower-bed edges. They’d heard the
adults: Did you know she crossed Times Square in the air?Did you know she can hang from the sky by her teeth? In
1949, my mother moved to Inglewood, California, into a house whose
cheap Spanish stucco revival style was rampant. The house’s
façade was adorned with a metal decorative plate –
a design of the times – and hydrangea beneath the front window.
If a house could be chaotic and changeable – a structure where,
within, a family could fall apart and be rejoined in days –
then the outside was similar but magnified. In a designated radius,
kids rode their bikes. They had to be careful riding past Tiny Kline’s
driveway and her shadowy open garage where she practiced. Other
garages were filled with men and tools and sawdust. In the aerialist’s
gym, she’d installed rings to practice holding herself up.
A mouth bit. All the contraptions the former performer wanted. By
then, she was in her fifties. She twirled. Traversed horizontal
bars. She wore shorts. Showed her tan legs. No one else bared her
legs or let her hair go like that – uncolored – into
a classy, silvery white. In the garage, my mother’s sister,
Mary, once turned the pages of Kline’s scrapbook: feats, pictures
with blue sky behind them, and photos of Kline’s husband who’d
died young. That afternoon, Tiny taught my aunt the Charleston.
It was a piece of cake to dance like that. That body had broken
records from the time it was still a girl: in burlesques, cooch
shows, and as a racy chariot driver. She’d clutched a tooth
fixture – metal and leather – as she crossed Madison
Square Garden and never heard what they said below. She’d
made so many slides for life that, in the air, suspended by her
teeth, what was time for her? In 1960, after my mother had
grown, Kline became “Tinkerbell” – a first – at
Disneyland. The former star, at seventy, slid from the Matterhorn
peak to the ground of the new theme park. For years, she braced
and bit down – iron, hook, leather, acid – until she
must have felt her muscles and forgotten them. From building to
building, she moved above the earth, whose details might have mattered
as much as dangling in air. The blue above, like the world below,
needed to be harnessed.